One Million Hits! But that’s not all…

On the eve of Halloween, which is also the anniversary of launching the Biofortified Blog, I am pleased to have several special announcements to make. Rather than write them out, I thought I would take to YouTube and announce them that way. As the title suggests, we now have over one million hits on our site – but that’s not the most exciting thing. We going to start something that everyone has been asking for, and we need your ideas to help make it happen. Without any further ado, I give you our 2013 5th Anniversary / Halloween Announcement! More details after the fold.

We’ve been doing this for five years, and there’s no better time than that to reach one million website hits, 10,000 blog comments, over 150 contributed posts among 921 total posts, and making a new record of over 58,000 hits per month! We couldn’t have done it without you. Now it’s time to give you something you’ve always wanted. Your own Frank N. Foode.™ We’re going to do a Kickstarter to raise funds to manufacture 500 Frank N. Foode™ plushes, and we need ideas for gifts to give our donors. I’m sure our readership of skilled and intelligent scientists and other geeks might have some ideas in mind. Is there something that you can do for donors as a gift? Let us know what you think of in the comments, and we can launch the Kickstarter in the next couple weeks!
Thanks for a great 5 years so far, and given the almost annual doubling rate, it won’t be much longer until we hit 2 million!
Happy Halloween!

Karl Haro von Mogel serves as BFI’s Director of Science and Media and as Co-Executive Editor of the Biofortified Blog. He has a PhD in Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics from UW-Madison with a minor in Life Sciences Communication. He is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Riverside and works on Citrus genetics.

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18 comments

Congratulations on the milestones, and thanks for all of your hard work in getting to this point!
I assume that Kickstarter’s ban on GMOs as rewards doesn’t extend to plush dolls, but there are a number of things in the Kickstarter guidelines that you might want to be careful about. Generally Kickstarter frowns upon “causes.” They also have a policy prohibiting rewards that are not produced by the project or its creators, which it sounded like you were planning to offer. They seem fairly lenient about the latter policy (see, for instance, the recent campaign for Civil Eats), but it may be that a different crowd-funding site is better-suited to your needs.

Oh, wow–that’s really great to hear. Some days it seems like nobody is aware of the science, but obviously somebody has heard!
I don’t know what to say about the Kickstarter awards. But I love my Biofortified bag. Maybe some signed copies of Tomorrow’s Table?
But wait–didn’t Kickstarter ban GMOs? Maybe you should consider another provider like IndieGoGo, Microryza, or something else?

We could go with a different crowdsourcing site, but Kickstarter is the most successful… plus we can bill this as a protest against the blanket GMO gift ban. After all, a Frank N. Foode plush represents GMOs, but is not itself a GMO – so it can be given out as a gift!
Oh duh! Books!

Was about to suggest some GMO seeds for our gardens, but what is this GMO ban on Kickstarter ? As a founder of Antony Evans’ Glowing plant project I’m surprized since their prizes DID include GMO seeds…

Thanks for the suggestions, Adam. I read the guidelines, and I don’t think we would run afoul of them. They actually have a lot of plush toy projects that have been approved and funded, and each one involved someone raising money to get a company to manufacture the plushes for them. So those plushes would be created by the project – I think they don’t want you giving away Snickers bars or something. Also, the project would fund the creation of 500 plushes, which may eventually support our other efforts as we make and sell additional ones, but that wouldn’t make this a fundraiser for a cause itself. I may also check with Kickstarter about the guidelines to make sure that everything is OK.

Maybe I misunderstood the video, I had the impression that you were soliciting donations of possible rewards. That’s where I thought you might run into the trouble with the rule about rewards that weren’t produced by the campaign. Like I said, they seem to be lenient, but I would not count on getting that kind of lenience because you have to know that (alas) there are people who will do anything they can to torpedo your campaign.

I’m open to using a different one, as a matter of fact we may run into fewer restrictions with regard to what gifts are given out. (The multiple-item restriction in Kickstarter is starting to look like a drawback.)